They couldn’t imagine what would have become of them had they been set adrift in that universe so similar and yet so different from their own without the help of the young mathematician, who was not only good at resolving practical problems, such as finding a way of earning a living or inventing an identity with which to be able to integrate into society, but also at other equally important things, such as staying sane. It was clear that only someone like Dodgson could have accepted their unbelievable tale almost without turning a hair, for the young professor saw the world through a child’s eyes, and, as everyone knows, children respond perfectly to nonsense: only they allow strange things to remain strange, refusing to apply to them the rules of any rational system. And it was thanks to this method that Wells, Jane, and Dodgson discovered many answers to their questions. The most important answer of all they arrived at that first evening when, after much speculation veering inevitably between clearheadedness and nonsensicality, they succeeded in establishing the main difference between their two universes, which would be the basis for all their future deliberations.
